The amount of time you spend researching a purchase should be directly proportional to the price of the item. In other words, as the cost of an item goes up, you should spend more time researching the purchase.

If a book costs $20 and a smartphone costs $300, which purchase should you spend more time researching? The phone, duh. An hour spent finding the best deal on the book might save you $3 when that same hour could save you $50 on the phone.

Too often we get it the other way around.  We spend hours comparing cheap everyday items between Walmart, Costco, etc. and then buy a new car the next weekend after visiting two dealerships. We focus on the chump change when, in reality, it’s all about the Benjamins.

Let’s look at some examples of what to do and not to do when buying big ticket items.

Buying a Car

Do not get the new car bug on a whim and decide you absolutely need one this weekend. Do not show the salesman how emotionally attached you are to the car. Don’t even become emotionally attached to the car. These things make a recipe for an uninformed, overpriced purchase.

Do lots of research online, comparing models, prices, etc. Cargurus.com is one of my favorite sites for this. Arm yourself for the negotiation by learning the salesman’s techniques. Carbuyingtips.com has a great section on this. This is likely the second biggest purchase of your life, so spend time on it!

Buying a House

Do not use your cousin Vito who sells real estate on the weekends as your realtor. Do not make the decision to buy after one weekend of looking at houses.

Do find a realtor who eats, drinks, and sleeps real estate. You want real estate pumping through your agent’s blood. You want an expert. Do spend lots of time online looking at neighborhoods where you want to live. This is probably the single biggest purchase of your life, so spend lots of time researching it!

Cool It, Cry Baby

Patience is the name of the game. Keep a cool head, don’t become emotionally attached (or at least don’t show it), and work through the fatigue of the research process. A few minutes more of work could save you hundreds!

We’ve got too much month left at the end of our money.

Paycheck to paycheck is a way of life for our family.

The little man can’t get ahead.

Have you ever heard people say things like this? (Maybe even yourself?) These are mantras poor people tell themselves to deal with their situation and bask in their hopelessness.

Some very few poor people are that way because of circumstances outside of their control, including real oppression (not very common here in the US) or illness whether mental or physical. These reasons are legitimate and not the focus of this post.

I want to talk about the self-made poor. Those who are poor because of their own decisions. I’ll be so bold as to say that most of the lower-middle class in America are of this sort.

Why are poor people poor & what keeps them that way?

The number one reason is that they engage in poor people behavior. If you want to be rich, do what rich people do. If you want to be poor, then learn this one rule:

Poor people are impulsive and do not think about the future, whether it be what to eat this week or how they’ll live during retirement.

1. Poor people don’t plan their meals, so driving home from work exhausted, they stop at McDonalds instead of having a pre-made meal ready in the fridge.
2. Poor people do not plan their spending, so they use debt (especially payday lenders) to finance their consumption. Since they have not planned, they put themselves in situations where they are at the mercy of scummy bottom-feeders like payday lenders.
3. Poor people care more about having things now to impress their friends than about how they will live during retirement. So they sink (borrowed) money into cars and toys that go down in value. Then they turn 65 and have to keep working just to avoid eating dog food until they die.

These are just a few of the manifestations of poor people behavior. The underlying cause of these symptoms is poor planning. So if you find yourself engaging in poor people actions, climb out of your pit of laziness and fear and DO SOMETHING!

There is hope. Start doing what rich people do and you are on your way to financial security. In the next post we’ll look at what rich people do that makes them that way.

If this post makes you mad, I’m okay with that. My purpose is not to offend, but to wake you up and show you how to live a better life.

Spend a couple of minutes here soaking up wisdom, or melt your brain with this Ke$ha song, your choice.

There’s a gap between what we know we should do and what we actually do. You know you should go to the gym instead of watching TV, but you come home from work and turn on Bachelor Pad.

You know you should save more for your retirement, but Best Buy keeps enticing you with massive discount on tablets. If human beings were completely rational, there would be no gap between what we know and what we do.

Why the gap? Because our environment has more impact on our choices than we think. To see real results in behavior change, try changing your milieu first. Side-step your willpower by putting yourself in fail-proof situations.

How to Short-Circuit Your Will Power By Changing Your Environment

1. I know I’ll spend cash if its in my wallet, so I don’t carry cash. For others, they may overspend with plastic, so they only carry cash and employ the envelope system.
2. Instead of writing a check each month to invest in your retirement account, set up automatic withdrawals from your checking account.This way you don’t even make the decision, “Should I put money in my investments this month?” because the decision is made for you.
3. When it comes to eating healthy, if you don’t buy junk food in the first place, then you don’t have to decide whether to eat well or not. If there’s no soda in the fridge, then when snack time comes around the decision to drink water is already made for you.

Here’s the bottom line: We put too much emphasis on strengthening our will power and disregard the influence that our environment has on our decisions. Its easier and more effective to first look for ways to change your surroundings and then focus on behavior change.

How do you side-step your will power by putting yourself in fail-proof situations?

Do not carry cash. You will spend it. Bada-bing bada-boom. Simple as that.

I know some financial gurus say to carry cash and use it because it “hurts more” than spending with plastic, but that has not been my experience.

When I’ve got a few bucks in my pocket and my stomach is grumbling, guess what, it doesn’t hurt at all to walk over to the vending machine and buy some brown sugar and cinnamon pop tarts. (The best kind, by the way.)

Here’s the thing: you think you have control over your behavior. Guess what, your environment has a lot more control over your behavior than you do. If you’ve got a few dollars in your wallet, they’re easy to burn on an impulse purchase.

So, to combat impulse spending, set up some barriers for yourself:

1. Do not carry cash around.
2. If you must carry cash around, carry large bills (at least $20′s) because you’ll be less apt to want to break them on small purchases. (And don’t worry about getting mugged and your cash getting stolen, thieves don’t expect people to carry cash nowadays.)
3. Use debit cards (especially rewards cards) for purchases. Only the most hi-tech vending machines accept cards as payment.

Bottom line: carrying small amounts of cash around results in impulse purchases and wasted cash. If you think your “will power” will protect you from nickel-and-diming away your future, you are mistaken. Your environment sends you cues about what to buy and if your cash is handy, you’re a goner.

Intro after long hiatus inaugurated by Dr. Dre:

Ya’ll know me still the same ol’ G
But I been low key
Hated on by most these bloggers
With no cheese, no deals and no Gs

Yeah, so, I’ve been absent from Bite Size Idea for awhile. The drive to write ebbs and flows.

While, now it’s ebbing.

Or perhaps flowing.

I probably shouldn’t use sayings that I don’t understand. Anyways, I’m in the mood to write.

Automate Your Finances!

One thing that’s been on my mind is all this talk about “automating your finances”. Automating your finances has become a buzzword (rather, buzzphrase) much like “synergy” or “networking” or “belieber“.

In a nutshell, automating your finances means setting up your various financial accounts (checking, savings, investing, etc) to automatically move money from one account to the other on a scheduled basis.

For example, one way to automate your finances is by setting up your IRA account to debit your checking account for a given amount the day after your paycheck hits the checking account.

One of my favorite personal finance bloggers, Ramit Sethi, has an epic post about financial automation, complete with a video! (Try not to get lost in his eyebrows, that’s just the way he is. Look past them and to the message he’s trying to deliver.)

Ramit is a big proponent of automating all of your finances. And he’s got some great reasons:

(INSERT REASONS HERE)

1. Emotions and behavior have a huge impact on financial decisions. Most of our tendencies have negative consequences for our finances. By automating, you get out of your money’s way and let it go where it needs to.
2. We’re lazy. When we have to manually write a check or authorize a transaction for our IRA, the chances of it actually getting done are about as good as Mariah Carey’s acting abilities.

Unautomate Your Finances!

Then, on the other end of the spectrum is another writer I admire, Baker, at Man vs Debt. He has an ebook called Unautomate Your Finances (not an affiliate link).

For 100% honesty, I must say that I haven’t read Baker’s ebook, but I’m familiar with the theories.

(INSERT THEORIES HERE)

1. The big problem with automation is that you don’t know how much you end up spending on stuff. If your cell phone bill is set to auto-debit your checking account or credit card, you could be running up fees and overages, then paying for them and have no idea.
2. The providers to whom you’ve given your auto-payment info could use it for evil. I listen to a consumer advocate’s (Clark Howard) radio show occasionally and he gets calls all the time from people complaining that one of their service providers has used their credit card info improperly.

With Our Powers Combined…

So who’s right? Both. Who’s wrong? Why does someone have to be wrong? Can’t we all just get along? A melding of the two approaches will give us optimal results.

What would it look like if Ramit and Baker had a love child? Probably something like this. How can we combine their powers for ultimate financial domination?

Here’s the short answer:

AUTOMATE YOUR SAVING AND INVESTING

AND UN-AUTOMATE YOUR BILLS

This approach gives us the best of both worlds: we trick ourselves into saving by taking choice out of the equation, since the money has moved to our savings/investing accounts before we could put our hands on it.

And we give due attention to bills because paying them is a manual process.

Just so you know, we practice what we preach in our family. Our IRAs and savings are set up to auto-debit from our checking accounts each month. Our internet, cell phone, utility, etc bills we pay manually each month.

How have you automated your finances? What has worked for you?

(image courtesy of The Next Web)

Ever heard of the term “lifestyle design”? How about the “deferred-lifestyle plan“? These are both terms coined by Tim Ferriss, a man on a mission to upend the way we look at work and life in general.

Tim Ferriss is the prolific author of the The 4-Hour Workweek, a #1 bestseller on The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek book lists. The book challenged the way I look at work-life balance and entrepreneurship. I have written about it a few times previously.

Tim runs a blog at fourhourworkweek.com/blog/ which showcases his “experiments in lifestyle design”. His posts are always interesting and often applicable. Many are written by Tim himself, but he also has a wide array of guests post on their areas of expertise.

Here are 6 of my favorite posts, either from Tim or his guests. Each one of these has challenged my assumptions about the status quo and made me reevaluate the way I live my life.

How It Works: Clinton’s “Reality Distortion Field” Charisma

Super-insightful post about interpersonal skills, specifically the power of eye contact. The guest author presents Bill Clinton as the master of eye contact and uses a clip from the 1992 presidential debates to make his point.

Watch the video on mute and you’ll see how much Clinton owned that debate by using eye contact and charisma.

From CEOs to Opera Singers – How to Harness the “Superstar Effect”

Tim’s guest in this post uses Pavarotti to illustrate the outsized gains that can be realized when one is recognized as the best in their field. He also shows how a high-school graduate with mediocre grades and test scores got into Stanford by using the superstar effect.

Read the post and look for areas at your workplace or in your social circles where you can stand out as the superstar.

The Psychology of Automation: Building a Bulletproof Personal-Finance System

Ramit Sethi, one of my favorite personal-finance authors, makes a guest appearance on Tim’s blog with this massive, informative post. Ramit unpacks the psychology behind personal finance and ways to trick our brains into winning with money.

Its full of sweet diagrams and the best part comes at the end: a 12-minute video outlining exactly how to automate your finances by circumventing your behavior. A must-read.

Cold Remedy: 18 Real-World Lifestyle Design Case Studies (Now It’s Your Turn)

Tim sent out a request for videos from anyone who had used principles from his book to create a small business, free up their time, and live a fuller life. He received tons of submissions and posted 18 of his favorites on his blog.

I like the guy who combines investing in gold bullion with fashionable belts. Fun idea.

Engineering a “Muse”: Case Studies of Successful Cash-Flow Businesses

Tim showcases 4 entrepreneurs that created their “muses” using the principles from The 4-Hour Workweek. A muse, in Tim’s words is “a low-maintenance business that generates significant income.”

The products are high-fidelity ear protection, foldable pedicure sandals, shampoo for thin hair, and snowboarding-specific boot insoles.

I love these posts because they give an inside view of running a very small business.

Engineering a “Muse” – Volume 2: Case Studies of Successful Cash-Flow Businesses

Edition two of Tim showcasing of successful entrepreneurs who followed his model.  The products shown are a laptop stand, butterfly repellent (funny idea), and a time-tracking service.

In addition to Tim’s awesome blog and book The 4-Hour Workweek, he just released a new book titled The 4-Hour Body. I can’t wait to read it.

Have you gotten the call?

The phone rings, it’s your brother-in-law and he’s out of cash again. He needs you to spot him $2,000 bucks to make it to the end of the month and then he’ll pay you back “real soon”.

Should you loan him the money? Should you refuse since the chances of him paying you back are about as slim as Lindsey Lohan actually graduating from rehab?

It’s a trap! Either way, you lose. “Loan” him the money and kiss it goodbye forever, all the while harboring resentful feelings for your cheap relative. Or, refuse it and  1) he hates your guts,  2) your wife calls you a heartless penny-pinching miser and  3) no one invites you over for Thanksgiving.

Ouch. What if there were another option? The best option?

There is. In fact, your brother-in-law doesn’t need the money as much as he needs your help.

Let me say that again, and more forcefully:

Your broke relatives don’t need your money, they need your help

When you loan money to family members, bad things happen.

Lending to Family Changes the Relationship

First of all, there is a very slim chance you will see your money again. And even if you do get paid back, the relationship has changed.

Proverbs 22:7 says, in part, “The borrower is servant (or “slave”, depending on the translation) to the lender.” I don’t care if you deny the divinity of the Bible, that statement is true.

Once you loan money to someone, you are constantly watching over their actions, wondering why they bought a new toy instead of paying you back. Loaning money to family changes your relationship in negative ways.

Lending is Treating the Symptom, Not the Cause

In medicine, there are medications to treat the symptoms of an illness and medications to treat the illness itself. One makes the pain go away temporarily, the other goes right to the source and attacks the cause of the pain.

When you simply give/loan money to family members, you treat the symptoms of their pain. You are giving them a temporary fix for their misbehavior. The more effective solution is to treat the cause of their pain, to alter their behavior.

You’ve heard the saying, “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he’ll start a chain of fast-food fish restaurants the likes of which the world has never seen.”

Or something like that, you get my point.

How to Treat the Cause of Money Pains

Let’s get back to that call from your brother-in-law. He needs help. He can’t make it to the end of the month without getting his electricity turned off. You’re a caring person. You’re not going to let him and his family suffer.

But what’s the right way to do it? You don’t want to ruin the family relationship and you don’t want to see him back in the same place next month.

Teach him to fish.

Instead of loaning money, gift him money with strings attached.

Give the money away as a gift with conditions. Tell him that you love him so much that you’ll help fix his immediate need (by gifting him cash) and his long-term need (money management skills).

How will you fix his long-term needs?

By attaching conditions to the gift. Tell him that he needs to visit with a financial counselor. Better yet, gift him a money management course such as Financial Peace University. Make him sit down and write out a monthly budget. Help him determine and fund his emergency fund. Help him create his debt snowball.

You get the idea. Teach him to fish!

I guarantee it will improve his situation lightyears more than “loaning” the $2,000 bucks and hoping he’ll repay someday.

What are your experiences with loaning money to family?

Happy Thanksgiving! On this day of gratitude, I’m thankful for so many things. Health, family, faith, and freedom, among others. Today I want to focus on financial freedom.

I am thankful to be free from debt. I am thankful to have an emergency fund, which allows us to be free from fear of living on the street. I am thankful to be able to do work I love, instead of being a “wage slave”.

This freedom came with a price. Natalya and I have made sacrifices and taken many small steps to get to where we are now. There have been many tools that helped us (and still do) along the way.

This Thanksgiving, I want to share some of the free tools we’ve used to get out of debt, get control of our money, and achieve financial freedom.

The Ultimate Debt Snowball Spreadsheet

I recently explained the debt snowball to a relative of mine, and thought a spreadsheet would help her out. So, I set to work creating a debt snowball spreadsheet in excel.

After half an hour of writing formulas, I decided to see if there were any available online for free. And I came across this awesome debt reduction calculator. Download it for free, enter your debts, and prepare to be flooded with information.

It will estimate your payoff date for each debt, the best order in which to pay them off, and the total interest you’ll pay for each debt. This spreadsheet will motivate you to pay off your debts and release yourself from bondage.

Gazelle Budget Lite

Dave Ramsey is the man when it comes to paying off debt and taking control of your money. Concerning budgets, he says:

A budget is you telling your money where to go at the beginning of the month instead of getting to the end of the month and wondering where it’s gone.

The Gazelle Budget Lite software is a free, quick, and easy way to create a first-draft budget. My favorite part is that he gives recommendations on what percentage of your income should be spent on each category.

Mint.com

This is a tool I use practically every day to track the health of our finances. In one place we track all of our financial accounts: checking, savings, credit (don’t have any), loans (none either), and investments.

We have also set up budgets here to track our spending. Every Sunday evening, we sit down with Mint.com and check the “budget meters” to see if we are on track for the month.

Mint.com is free (they make money by suggesting financial products based on your usage), your data is anonymous, and they use bank-level security.

Perkstreet.com

Perkstreet offers an innovative way to bank: They give you cash back on debit-card purchases! Since we don’t use credit cards, this is the best way for us to earn cash back on our spending.

Back in the good old days of high interest, we had a rewards checking account that earned 5% per year on the balance. We were living high!

Then came the economic crash. Interest rates on our checking account to date have dropped to 0.5%! Ouch.

So, in the current climate, 2% back on purchases is a much better way to earn money with our checking account.

We love perkstreet, but it’s not for everyone. Banking with perkstreet is best for people who prefer banking online and use debit cards for most of their purchases.

So there you have it: four awesome, free tools that have helped on our journey to financial freedom.

What tools do you use to dominate your money?

Bartering.

Haggling.

Negotiating.

What comes to mind when you read those words? I think of a sleazy used-car salesman. Most Americans have a negative view of bartering. We’re used to seeing a posted price and paying it.

Living abroad for two years, I attended lots of outdoor markets and saw the difference in shopping habits. Posted prices meant little–they were a place to start bartering from. The merchants weren’t offended if a customer attempted to work out a deal.

I made a few minor attempts at bartering on the French streets. I don’t remember if they were successful or not but I do remember how uncomfortable I felt doing it. Negotiating is not an inborn skill of mine.

But it’s one I want to develop.

So, I’ve been studying the art of negotiation. Here are some highlights of what I’ve discovered so far:

Detached Involvement

To negotiate effectively, one must practice what Herb Cohen, negotiating guru, calls “detached involvement”. Meaning that you care, but not very much. The more emotional investment you have in a transaction, the more you are willing to sacrifice for it. The more you are willing to sacrifice, the easier it is to take advantage of you.

Effective negotiators (such as used car salesmen) can smell desperation from miles away. Your desperation is the “blood in the water”. The sharks smell it and come in for the kill.

Use the principle of detached involvement in two ways: first, care about what you are negotiating, but not that much. Don’t let your emotions be your “tell”, the thing that gives you away to the other side.

Second, watch the other side and asses their emotional investment. If they are deeply and conspicuously involved, then you have the advantage. You now know that you can be more aggressive in your requests.

Slow Down, Partner

Put time on your side. If you need it now, and advertise that need to the other side, you are at the disadvantage. The other side will see your need and offer fewer concessions. By being impatient, you have become emotionally invested and violated the previous rule.

The more time you spend looking at options and letting the “I want it now!” impulse die down, the better deal you’ll find.

Often, experienced salesmen will attempt the “hard sell”. They present offers as once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, one-of-a-kind deals, or other methods to get you to buy now. Don’t go for these high-pressure tactics. In these situations the only thing you need to buy yourself is some time.

Buy yourself this needed time to think things over by limiting your own authority. Say something like, “Thank you for the offer, I will present it to my board/CEO/wife.” By making someone else’s word final, you can’t close the deal right then, when the salesman is breathing down your neck.

If the salesman won’t give you time to think it over or discuss it with someone else, walk away. The deal is almost certainly not worth it.

Information Superweapon

You won’t have any idea what a good deal looks like until you do some research first. Never take the salesman’s word on how much of a discount you’re getting. Look on the internet, check competitor’s prices, look at what comparables have sold for recently.

In negotiating, information is power. Walking into the dealership armed with facts and figures cuts down on the likelihood of getting swindled. Once the dealer sees that you know your stuff, his prices will have to come down to earth or you’ll be out the door.

Miss Congeniality

Always, always begin your negotiations in a friendly manner. You can move to playing hardball if needs be, but don’t start there.

Why? Two big reasons:

The norm of reciprocity is very strong in humans. We mirror the behavior of those we interact with. If someone approaches you smiling, complimenting you on your shirt, do you frown and curse them under your breath? No way.

Now, what if that same person approaches you with a scowl and middle finger? Different story.

The second reason to start out friendly has to to with adjusting your approach. It’s easy to move from friendly to confrontational and nearly  impossible to move from hardball to nice. If you start out red-faced with your voice raised, the other side puts up thier walls. Good luck trying to get any flattery or smiles past those 10-foot thick barricades.

You know how the saying goes, “You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” Don’t rule out using a firm, confrontational approach, just don’t start that way. Start out friendly and then move to hardball if the situation demands.

Go Forth and Conquer

Well, now you know all of the tricks I’ve learned so far. Most of it has to do with going into a negotiating situation armed with information, detached from strong emotions, and in a friendly manner.

What negotiating skills have you learned?

(This is a guest post from Jack Reed. Since I know very little about bankruptcy, I asked Jack to point out some common misconceptions about the process.)

The very thought of going bankrupt gives sleepless nights to consumers facing overwhelming debt problems.  The prime reason behind it is nothing but the social stigma associated with bankruptcy.

Like most big and frightening things, bankruptcy has a reputation that is glossed with a lot of myths and misconceptions. The myths have been embellished to such an extent that they have instilled in consumers a deep rooted fear of being a financial castaway.

The following are some common bankruptcy myths that greatly affect a debtor’s decision of bankruptcy filing:

1. Bankruptcy will lead to social disgrace

It is the most common misconception about bankruptcy. It is true that bankruptcy is a public legal proceeding but it also true that there are huge numbers of bankruptcy filings everyday and no one takes the pain to follow all of them diligently.

Unless you are a socially prominent person drawing a lot of media attention, the only people interested in your bankruptcy filing will be your creditors and no one else.

2. Personal bankruptcy is meant for the poor only

Another common stigma associated with bankruptcy says that personal bankruptcy is only for the poor. But the real picture is quite different.

The terrible economic downturn in the recent years has pushed numerous formerly affluent people into bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is no more a social stigma but a financial catastrophe that can hit any of us.

3. Bankruptcy will eliminate all your obligations

It is common wrong notion with which consumers file for bankruptcy. Bankruptcy will not waive off all your debts. You will still be liable for obligation such as child support and alimony, federal student loans and most taxes owed to the federal government.

4. You will lose all your assets

This is an important misconception that makes the debtors dread bankruptcy. Most of the consumers think that the state will liquidate everything they have and they will be financial impoverished forever. But, in reality the federal as well as the state governments have wide range of exemptions to protect the certain kind of assets from liquidation.

Moreover only Chapter 7 bankruptcy is liquidation bankruptcy. If you file for bankruptcy under Chapter 13, you will not have to go through liquidation proceedings.

5. Your credit worthiness will be ruined forever

It is true that bankruptcy stays on your credit report for 7 to 10 years depending upon the bankruptcy you file for. But it certainly does not mean that your credit worthiness will go for a toss forever.

Bankruptcy, in fact, paves way for you to build your finances afresh. All you need to do is take wise financial decisions post-bankruptcy and rebuild your credit worthiness.

6. Both the spouses need to file for bankruptcy

It is not necessary. Both the spouses will be required to file for bankruptcy together only if they owe the debts jointly.

7. You will have to repay your debts even after bankruptcy

This is a common misconception that creditors want you to harbor so that you feel obligated to repay your debts even after the bankruptcy procedure is over. However, in reality, you are neither legally nor morally liable for the debts that are discharged through bankruptcy.

8. Filing for bankruptcy is difficult

It is another myth that dissuades debtors from filing bankruptcy. But bankruptcy filing is not as difficult as it seems. You can even file for bankruptcy without a lawyer’s help. All you need to do is fill out the forms correctly and submit all the required documents properly.

However, it is always advised that you seek help from a lawyer while filing for bankruptcy.

9. You may exclude some creditors from your petition

This is another commonly mistaken idea. Bankruptcy will require you to include all your creditors in the petition.

10. You can’t file for bankruptcy more than once

It is completely untrue. After a successfully completing a bankruptcy case, you cannot file for bankruptcy within the next 8 years. For Chapter 13 bankruptcy you can file more often that, but you cannot undergo more than one bankruptcy case at a time.

Nevertheless, having multiple bankruptcies on your credit report is never a good idea and can harm your credit worthiness.

There is indeed nothing very pleasant about bankruptcy. But, it is definitely not as dreadful as you imagined it to be. So, if you are struggling with overwhelming debts that cannot be managed with any other debt relief option, then you can safely file for bankruptcy.

It is the most logical and favorable debt relief option that can get you out of your insurmountable obligations and help you shape you finances afresh.